Maryland’s Place in Space: A NASA Demo

On May 30th, 2009, Rex worked with NASA to host Maryland's Place in Space, a event that demonstrated to the public NASA's works and promoted FIRST robotics. About 10 Teams attended the event, while a few thousand visitors streamed through the Baltimore convention center. Rex played an instrumental roll in assuring that the event went off without a hitch. Thank you to everyone who came, especially the mentors and alumni who were managing the field, and students who volunteered to assist NASA.




New LeadershipAfter a very intensive competition between the candidates, the result are the following:
President: Andrew Shapiro
Vice President: Aki Ko
Treasurer: Karen Hecht
Historian: Laura Panneton
Secretary: Jason Ma
Safety Captain: Lyra Meurer



Rex #1 Seed at the Chesapeake RegionalThis past March 19th-21st, the Rex team drove to our home competition, the Chesapeake regional in Annapolis.

In this competition, the robot performed extremely well. Although the first match was a tie, all six following qualification matches ended in a win for REX! After the tense last qualification match, Rex was ranked number one in the whole regional!

As the top seeded team, Rex chose the first alliance partner. We selected team 190, Gompei and the H.E.R.D., because of their formidable robot. When selection came back up the line to Rex, our representative selected The Duct Tape Bandits, team 467.

In the elimination tournament, the 1727 alliance won both matches and advanced through the quarter finals. Unfortunately, Rex's luck turned in the semifinals, when Rex's alliance lost both matches; one match was only barely lost due to a penalty.

Later at the award ceremony, the Rex team won the judges' award. The team was cited for its outstanding outreach, robot performance, and spirit.


REX Rocks the DC RegionalREX traveled to the week one Washington DC regional FRC competition with their 2009 Lunacy robot.

The REX team did not rank in the top 8 teams at the regional after the qualification rounds. However, the #6 ranked team, 2199 the Robo-Lions, were wise enough to choose REX as their alliance partner in the elimination tournament. The alliance went on to choose team 836, the RoboBees, as their third alliance member, rounding out the group with three Maryland teams.

In the quarter finals, the REX alliance won both matches, advancing to the semi-finals. But the alliance lost in the semi-finals to other powerful teams after two tense matches. But even in defeat, REX led its alliance partners back into the pits to celebrate their cooperation. Chantings of "Chesapeake!" or "Robo-Lions!" could be heard from back in the stands.

Later at the award ceremony, REX's chants, dancing, and spirit payed off when they won the Chrysler Team Spirit Award. The award speech not only mentioned the team's vocal nature at the comprtition, but their previous outreach, such as taking the robot to the opening of Wall-E.

REX would like to thank all of the team members and mentors who attended DC and made our success possible.



Build Season is Over, Competition Season is here!

Rex has successfully completed the 2009 Lunacy robot
"Rex 4 The Win", and shipped it to the DC regional. Check out the Robot section of the website for a description of the Lunacy Robot.

Rex will soon be going to the DC Regional on February 28th. All team members and team parents who wish to come MUST have their forms turned in before the first day of the regional. We will be leaving at 5:00 AM Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, so please come by at least 4:45 AM, and set your alarm early!

If you have any problems or questions, please talk to Mr. Bruneau or contact him using the website contact address
(at the bottom of the page).











Video Section CompleteThank you for the long wait, our Video Section is finally up! The section currently contains a fair sampling of the team videos: The VEX Event, the 2008 Duct Tape Fundraiser, and the 2006 Chesapeake Regional. More videos will be added as they are produced.


REX's Annual Fundraiser Dinner a Success! REX would like to thank everyone who went to it’s Spaghetti Dinner of 5 February 2009, who were treated to excellent food, robotic displays and our new robot, all for only 8 dollars! Our club decided to hold the dinner fund raiser to accomplish 2 goals: to wanted to raise funds and to show off our newest creation. We set up a complete VEX field for the children to play with, and it was a huge hit with the younger crowd. Our 2008 robot was running around carrying trackballs and impressing the audience.

We are proud of the fact that families donated food still came and paid to eat. This shows the awesome amount of support our families provide for our club. Over 170 tickets were sold to family friends and supporters. With many generous unsolicited donations the total we were able to raise in one evening was 900 dollars, which will go to fund our robot and our attendances at competitions.

Another thing the team was very proud of was that the planning and execution of this glorious event was done by team members. Even though parents and friends helped we viewed it as our responsibility to make the event exceptional and we are proud to say we made it an event to remember.

VEXDulaney Robotics was extremely proud to host the Baltimore County VEX tournament. 24 County teams competed in this unique display of cooperative effort among various Baltimore County High Schools, the Baltimore County Career and Technology (CTE) Curriculum Office and Dulaney Robotics.

In the fall of 2008 MR Brian Bruneau (Dulaney club advisor) was asked by Baltimore County to develop a professional development program to show schools how to incorporate robotics into the engineering curriculum using the VEX robot. Through experience MR Bruneau knew that competition was the best motivator for robotics programs, so he asked the curriculum office if he could host a competition in December of 2008 that the Baltimore County schools could compete in.

While hashing out the details with Doug Handy and Mike McIntyre of the CTE curriculum office a truly innovative idea was hatched. The CTE office funded the purchase of a VEX educational robot for each school that participated. They also paid for the registration fee for each team. As details developed for the event it was truly exciting for all involved. Eighteen of the twenty-five high schools in the county showed interest.

Dulaney robotics took on this awesome responsibility with no experience in managing VEX events. The club had never even been to a VEX event in the past. We had to figure out how to incorporate sound for music and announcers, official score results, video from contest play, and manage 2 event fields along with a practice field and a skills challenge field. We also were charged with running an event full of teams that had never done a VEX tournament before as well.

The Dulaney Robotics kids and mentors shined on December 13, 2008. Our cafeteria was rocking with 24 teams present with highly capable robots! The club sold food as a fundraiser, managed the field control system, supervised the sound system, acted as referees and managed the help/first aid desk.

Mike McIntyre and Doug Handy set up the judging process and did a great job recognizing the stellar teams in the competition. It was a fun day for all. Through this wonderful event Baltimore County schools were able to encourage robotics in their engineering curriculum at NO cost to the school in an environment where they competed among schools with similar experience levels.

Since it was such an exceptional event Dulaney has been asked to set up next year’s Baltimore County VEX challenge, at another school, next year on December 12, 2009. Also, because of our new expertise at managing events of this size we plan to independently conduct a scrimmage for both the FIRST Tech Challenge and the FIRST Lego League competition next year as well!


Spaghetti Dinner NightThis Thursday the 5th REX will be having our annual fund raising dinner. This year we will be hosting our own spaghetti dinner! The dinner will be 5:30 to 8:00 p.m. February Fifth, with eat in and carry out in the Dulaney Cafeteria. Tickets will be $8, and all team members are required to sell at least 4 tickets.

To members selling tickets, please return payment for the tickets to Karen Hecht, the team treasurer. The deadline is this Thursday the 29th, but payment will still be accepted afterward until the dinner.




Rex is Traveling to the DC and Chesapeake RegionalsThe Rex team will be traveling to the DC regional February 26th and the Chesapeake regional March 19th this season. We will be renting a bus for DC, but we may require parent drivers for Chesapeake.

Statement of intent forms have been distributed and should be returned to Mr. Bruneau ASAP. These forms give us an idea of how many people are coming to these events. If you have any questions or need a form, please see Mr. Bruneau or a Rex leadership member.


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